bit

​ A piece of metal placed in a horse's mouth and connected to reins to direct the animal.

Horses hate having bits put in their mouth.

A rotary cutting tool fitted to a drill, used to make holes.

(US) An eighth of a dollar. Note that there is no coin minted worth 12.5 cents. (When this term first came into use, the Spanish 8 reales coin was widely used as a dollar equivalent, and thus the 1 real coin was equivalent to 12.5 cents.)

A quarter is two bits.

(dated, UK) A coin of a specified value. (Also used for a nine-pence coin in the British Caribbean.)

A threepenny bit.

(historical, US) In the southern and southwestern states, a small silver coin (such as the real) formerly current; commonly, one worth about 12½ cents; also, the sum of 12½ cents.

There were bits of paper all over the floor. Does your leg still hurt? / Just a bit now. I have done my bit, I expect you to do yours.

A small amount of something.

(informal) Specifically, a small amount of time.

I'll be there in a bit, I need to take care of something first. He was here just a bit ago, but it looks like he's stepped out.

A portion of something.

I'd like a big bit of cake, please.

Somewhat; something, but not very great; also used like jot and whit to express the smallest degree.

Am I bored? Not a bit of it!

(slang) A prison sentence, especially a short one.

An excerpt of material making up part of a show, comedy routine, etc.

His bit about video games was not nearly as entertaining as the other segments of his show.

The part of a key which enters the lock and acts upon the bolt and tumblers.

Coined by John Tukey in 1946 as an abbreviation of binary digit, probably influenced by connotations of “small portion”. First used in print 1948 by Claude Shannon. Compare byte and nybble.

bit - Computer Definition

A small piece or quantity.

A contraction of the term binary digit, a bit is an individual 1 or 0 in a binary numeration system, a base 2 numbering system. So, a bit is the smallest unit of digital data.The word first appeared in print in 1948 in a paper written by Claude Shannon, who credited John Tukey, an early computer scientist at Bell Telephone Laboratories with coining the term in 1947. Tukey later wrote that the term evolved as an alternative to bigit or binit. See also binary and bit rate.

In coinage, originally a small silver coin worth one-eighth ( 1 / 8 ) of a Spanish peso. Later, a small British coin, a threepenny bit. Now commonly used to mean one-eighth ( 1 / 8 ) of a U.S. dollar, or twelve and a half (12 1 / 2 cents), usually in the phrases two bits ( 1 / 4 of a dollar, or 25 cents), four bits ( 1 / 2 of a dollar, or 50 cents), and six bits ( 3 / 4 of a dollar, or 75 cents). As the story goes, coins, especially small coins, were scarce in colonial America, so it was common practice to cut a bit (or two bits) off of a dollar coin to make change.

(BInary digiT) The smallest element of computer storage. It is a single digit in a binary number (0 or 1). The bit is physically a transistor or capacitor in a memory cell, a magnetic domain on disk or tape, a reflective spot on optical media or a high or low voltage pulsing through a circuit.
Bits for Transmission
Bits are widely used as a measurement for network transmission. One hundred megabits per second means that 100 million pulses are transmitted per second.
Bytes for Storage
Groups of bits make up storage units in the computer, called "characters," "bytes," or "words," which are manipulated as a group. The most common is the byte, made up of eight bits and equivalent to one alphanumeric character. Measurements for storage components, such as disks, files and databases, are given in bytes rather than bits. See space/time.

Storage - Making it Smaller

Making the spot or cell smaller increases the storage capacity. Our disks hold staggering amounts of data compared to 10 years ago, yet we still want more. Look up holographic storage for a look into a fascinating future of storage technology.

Transmission - Making it Faster

The bit is transmitted as a pulse of high or low voltage. Speed is increased by making the transistors open and close faster, which is a combination of making the microscopic elements within the transistor smaller and more durable.

Transmitting pulses internally in the computer is much simpler than out over a network, where they are influenced by long distances and interference. The telephone companies pioneered the deployment of high-speed optical trunks, which overcome some of these limitations.

Words near bit in the dictionary

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Well you could have been lonely every night now,Could have cried a whole lot more, been a little bit blueOh, you could have been lonely, for your one and only,You could have loved me as much as I love you. Hoyt Axton